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Monday, February 20, 2012 Issue 28
T H E
E D I T O R I A L L Y
PUBLISHED SINCE 1906 http://utdailybeacon.com
Vol. 119
I N D E P E N D E N T
S T U D E N T
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N E W S P A P E R
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U N I V E R S I T Y
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East TN co-op provides organic food Sarah Jung Staff Writer A blue and yellow sign with a rooster and three stars illuminates the corner of Baxter Avenue and North Central Street in North Knoxville. The sign sits above a new and fresh barn-like building. On the outside it might not look special or unusual, but inside it’s unlike anything else in Knoxville. The clean glass doors of Three Rivers Market (TRM) slide open. A mix of easy listening music plays through the speakers. Sunlight floods the facility through windowpanes that line the ceiling. Aisles and bins full of colorful, local, organic and natural foods invite each shopper to browse the shelves and pick out a product that builds the local economy. Three Rivers Market is Tennessee’s only food cooperative and is owned by more than 3,600 community members. It is democratically controlled by the members and a volunteer board of directors elected by TRM members. “We’re a community-owned store instead of corporately or privately owned, which means there is transparency and a big emphasis on member participation,” Katie Ries, outreach and marketing director, said. “We’ve come together and created a
place where our common economic, social and cultural needs are met when it comes to food. What’s so cool about our store is that the community ownership ensures that profits stay in our community.” Just $25 a share purchase of TRM and makes a customer a current member-owner. After a year, they will still own that share but the membership won’t be current. It’s easy to renew a membership at the market. “Purchasing a share and becoming an owner gives people a stake in an honest, open and fair, accountable and communitymined business,” Ries said. It’s not required to be a member to shop at Three Rivers Market, but there are incentives to becoming a member and shareholder. “To be a fair share owner is the goal,” Ries said. “That means you own eight shares, the equivalent to $200 and eight years of membership. Fair share owners are able to receive a patronage fund and, if interested, can make a member loan to TRM.” Members and shoppers enjoy an array of local, organic and natural products. Three Rivers Market works with 35 to 40 East Tennessee farmers and is always seeking to work with more. See THREE RIVERS on Page 3
• Photo courtesy of knoxyankee.com
Patrons check out after browsing a mix of local organic food offered at Three Rivers Market. TRM offers Knoxville’s only food cooperative, run by and serving its members to bring a community-driven approach to shopping in the Knoxville area.
‘TED talks’ come to UT Caroline Snapp Staff Writer This past Friday, TEDxUTK hosted “A Whirlwind of Opportunity” in an effort to encourage students to expand their horizons with intellectually-stimulating speakers. “‘TED talks’ is a nationwide lecture circuit, and TEDx is a branch of ‘TED talks’ that are independently produced events at colleges around the country,” said Matt Burkhart, a student from Pellisippi State who volunteered to assist with filming the seminar and lighting. The whole idea behind TEDx is to promote innovation across college campuses. According to the its website, TEDx was created in the spirit of TED’s mission: “ideas worth spreading.” The website said the program was designed to give communities, organizations and individuals the opportunity to stimulate dialogue
through TED-like experiences at a local level. “The speakers will be experts in a certain field and they’ll come in and talk about some certain advancement or idea and the purpose of it is to expand our horizons as humans,” Burkhart said. “We had one guy talk about nuclear power and one guy talk about earth housing, really just things to help out the environment and advancing technology, things like that.” Christine Ware, senior in psychology, was in charge of coordinating volunteers and finding sponsors for the event. “Basically Lindsay Hummel ,the coordinator, thought of the theme ‘A Whirlwind of Opportunity,’ which actually is the title of the big art sculpture by the library on Pedestrian Walkway,” Ware said. “It’s all really big ideas that might happen in the future, and we wanted to create a culture here for that.” See TED X UTK on Page 3
Lawyers want cruise ship captain drug tested The Associated Press ROME — Lawyers for survivors of the capsized Costa Concordia cruise ship on Saturday pressed for new drug tests on the ship’s captain after traces of cocaine were reportedly found on the outside of a hair sample. But the consultant who did the analyses for prosecutors stood by results, which found no presence of the drug in urine samples or within the hair of Captain Francesco Schettino. Italian consumer protection group Codacons is representing some survivors of the shipwreck of the cruise liner, which rammed a reef near a Tuscan island the night of Jan. 13. Under Italian law, those attaching civil suits to a criminal case must be informed of, and allowed to monitor, evidence and other developments in the probe. Codacons said Saturday that some traces of cocaine were found on a hair sample and in an envelope containing the sample, but noted that a urine sample taken from Schettino and an analysis of the hair itself found no presence of the drug. It called that finding “very strange” and said it had asked prosecutors on Friday to order new testing
to see if the samples might have been contaminated. The Italian news agency ANSA quoted the forensic medical expert who carried out the toxicology test as dismissing Codacons’ concerns about the external trace of cocaine. The expert, Marcello Chiarotti, was quoted as saying the modest trace of cocaine “was a marginal problem that absolutely doesn’t invalidate the results of the analysis” that found none of the drug inside the hair itself or in the urine. Traces of cocaine in the urine or inside the hair itself would have pointed to consumption. The prosecutor’s office in Grosseto, Tuscany, was closed Saturday, as was the law office of the attorney defending Schettino, who is under house arrest in his home near Naples while he is investigated for alleged manslaughter, causing a shipwreck and abandoning his ship. The lawyer could not be reached by cell phone. But ANSA quoted the lawyer, Bruno Leporatti, as saying the test results yielded nothing new. “We have always been sure that Schettino didn't take drugs,” the Grossetobased lawyer was quoted as saying. Schettino has denied abandoning ship and insisted the
reef was not marked on navigational charts. Thirty-two people are believed to have perished, including 15 whose bodies have not been found. Chiarotti was described as expressing confidence in the results. “We will be able to clear this problem up later,” ANSA quoted him as saying. “Those who work in our field know that there can be problems like this.” He told ANSA that “the results leave no doubt,” adding that he would formally hand in the report to prosecutors next week. Chiarotti is on the teaching staff of Rome’s Catholic University of the Sacred Heart. The university said he was not in his office Saturday. ANSA, without citing sources, said that traces of the drug might have resulted if Schettino’s hair had come in contact with someone who had handled cocaine. A Codacons spokesman, Stefano Zerbi, told The AP that the group was raising the possibility with prosecutors that the samples might have been poorly preserved. Codacons’ statement said the results indicate a “strange, passive contamination,” in which cocaine somehow got onto Schettino’s hair even though he wasn’t using the drug.
James Hayden • The Daily Beacon
Dr. Matthew Restall, professor of history at Penn State University, speaks to students as part of the “End of the World as We Know It” lecture on Thursday, Feb. 16. Restall’s presentation, “The Maya, The West, and this Year’s Apocalypse,” served to draw conclusions on the ancient Mayan calendar’s end and the state of the current world.